The new Mitt Romney documentary Mitt, which is currently streaming on Netflix, opens with the event that most likely will be his
legacy—Election Night 2012. His campaign over, his defeat at the hands of
Barack Obama assured, he sits among his quiet, despondent family in a hotel
suite. "What do you think you say in a concession speech?" he asks.

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That
loss hangs heavy over the rest of Mitt,
which spends its remaining running time flashing back to the Republican
presidential aspirant's unsuccessful 2008 and 2012 campaigns. Mitt isn't scandalous: The film avoids
juicy behind-the-scenes political intrigue a la The War Room to focus on Romney with his family in between his
many campaign demands. There aren't big gotcha moments—although director Greg Whiteley doesn't canonize the guy, either—but what does make Mitt remarkable is that it's one of
those rare times where we're shown what failure looks like.

Netflix
is advertising Mitt with the tagline,
"Whatever side you're on, see another side," promising a glimpse of the "real"
presidential candidate and former Massachusetts governor. Yet the "other side"
it wants us to see is all the minutiae that goes into a presidential campaign—the
sitting around with your wife before a televised debate, the late-night powwows
about primary numbers, the endless traveling. This is the guts of Mitt, and because the final outcome is
known from the beginning, there's a strange poignancy to the futility of what
we observe. Normally, such a backstage, procedural documentary shows us all the
hard work as an inevitable precursor to the eventual triumph. But not Mitt. We watch a guy working very, very
hard, even though we know he's going to fall short.

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Typically,
Americans aren't comfortable with losers. Living in a culture that produces
dozens of award shows and reality competitions, we remember the victors more
than the vanquished. We cheer on our sports champions, invite them to the White
House and buy their motivational books in the belief that if we follow their
example, we can be champions, too. If we do remember losers, it's because we've
reduced them to cultural punch lines (e.g., Bill Buckner). We all just want to
go to Disneyland.

This
explains why American movies sell inspiration, not disappointment: We want to
believe that our efforts are always rewarded. When Hollywood produced Moneyball about Billy Beane, the savvy,
penny-pinching Oakland A's general manager, it couldn't end with the A's
winning the World Series because that didn't happen. Instead, the filmmakers
had to shift the story to a celebration of the club's 20-game winning streak
and Beane's loving, fulfilling relationship with his daughter. When Apollo
Creed defeats Rocky in the first Rocky,
Sylvester Stallone's underdog isn't portrayed as a loser; he gains a moral
victory for standing strong against the champ. And it's not just fiction films
that move the goalposts: Documentaries will often try to soft-pedal tough
social realities with an optimistic we-can-fix-this message at the end that
makes us feel like victory is just one check to a charity away. When we do
permit ourselves as a society to talk about failure, it's usually in the
context of it being a precursor to making a comeback, showing how that failure
was motivation for a later triumph—so even in that case, failure isn't really
failure.

By
comparison, Mitt really is about
failure, and Whiteley doesn't try to pretty up that fact by giving Romney and
his wife a heroic send-off at the movie's finale. (Spoiler alert: They thank
the Secret Service agents who watched over them, go inside their house and sit
down.) And what's beautiful and tragic about that failure is that they don't
know that failure is coming—they're doing their best to ensure an election
victory. In its quiet way, Mitt hits
at a universal truth: I can work my ass
off and be a good person, but I still might not end up getting what I want.

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It's
a truth we have a difficult time accepting. In fact, we'll do just about
anything to deny it. That's why there might have been a temptation for some
filmmakers to turn Romney into a subject of easy ridicule, not so subtly laying
out clues to suggest why he lost to Obama, painting the candidate as no better
than the buffoons in a Christopher Guest mockumentary. But aside from showing
Romney try to iron his tuxedo while wearing it, Mitt has
too much respect for the guy to take potshots at him. Spending six years
chronicling the Romney family, Whiteley clearly felt close to these people, and
that compassion is rewarded through his ability to capture intimate family
moments, like when Romney and his brood are sitting around deciding whether he
wants to run in 2008. As his son Tagg puts it, even if Romney doesn't win,
"we'll still love you. The country may think of you as a laughingstock—we'll
know the truth. And that's okay. But I think you have a duty to your country
and to God to see what comes of it." The movie understands that the path to
winning is the exact same path to losing—we just don't know which road we're on
until it's over.

Maybe
our discomfort with losers suggests why some have misread Mitt, expecting the movie to be something it isn't. The Huffington Post's Sarah Beauchamp suggested
that Mitt "confirms why Romney isn't
president," pointing to moments from the documentary where Romney states that
Obama is a formidable opponent and that his own candidacy is flawed because of
the negative public image of him as a flip-flopper.

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But
Beauchamp's after-the-fact analysis feels like the same Monday-morning
quarterbacking that goes on in sports, fixating on one or two weaknesses in a
game plan as indicative of why a team couldn't have possibly won. What might be
most upsetting to some viewers is that Mitt
eschews such simplistic, kneejerk analysis. From the movie's perspective,
losing a presidential election doesn't look that
different than winning one. (For any Mitt
viewer to assume that everyone in Obama's camp was completely confident and
never had any misgivings about running for office is the mistake that our
just-win-baby culture makes all the time: We take it as a given that all
champions are inherently, unquestionably superior to their opponents, ignoring
how circumstance, timing and luck can play into these contests.)

By showing
Romney compassion, Whiteley makes us sit in the skin of a loser and forces us
to get accustomed to it. Normally, we're too busy mocking that individual or
rushing to explain why he failed, positioning ourselves as smarter or shrewder than
the loser. What we almost never do is simply recognize that losing is a part of
life.

Flawed
candidate that he was, Romney at least understood this. Near Mitt's opening, Whiteley shows footage
of Romney speaking to some supporters in the buildup to the 2008 campaign,
where he'd eventually lose the Republican nomination to Arizona Senator John
McCain. Romney is clear-eyed about what he's getting himself into. "I have looked
at what happens to anybody in this country who loses as the nominee of their
party," he admits. "They become a loser for life." The crowd laughs. Romney
then references Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis, who lost to
George H.W. Bush in 1988. "He can't get a job mowing lawns," Romney says, to
more laughter. But Romney doesn't seem to be making fun of Dukakis: "We just
brutalize whoever loses, all right? And I know that—I know that. I'm going in
with my eyes open."

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It
takes courage to put yourself on the line—to risk being brutalized or mocked
for grabbing for that proverbial brass ring. (Of course, there's ego and
ambition involved as well.) But too often, we try to soften that blow by
telling ourselves that the risks and sacrifices are worth it because we'll get
rewarded—that we're made of sterner, better stuff than those losers, and
therefore, we won't suffer the same fate. Mitt
throws cold water all over those bromides. Losing is lonely and hard, and
none of us are immune to it. Romney is in a select group of people who have
failed in such a public way—which makes him a giant loser. That's a fact, but
we also rush to turn that into a judgment. This is why Mitt is so valuable. For
once, a movie shines a light on the part of the American Dream that's always
lurking in the shadows but that we're too afraid to acknowledge: Sometimes, the
other guy wins.

Tim Grierson is Playboy for iPhone's critic-at-large.
His
biography of Wilco, "Sunken
Treasure," is
available now on Amazon. Follow him on Twitter @timgrierson.